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Evaluative Bibliography Of Research
Rough Draft due Monday, April 3, midnight
Final Draft TBA
Evaluative Annotated Bibliography – 20%
Final Draft Due April 20, midnight.
Add a brief introductory paragraph stating the purpose of this paper.
Add a brief final paragraph generally supporting your source choices versus the other possible
choices.
Assignment:
Produce an evaluative annotated bibliography that collects, summarizes, and explains the best
secondary sources available on your narrowed topic (there will also be an in-class research
presentation, five minutes in length, worth 5% of your final grade). Many of the sources collected
will be scholarly. The annotated bibliography will 1) summarize the source 2) explain its rhetorical
context (the journal and its audience, the purpose of the article, the conversation/debate it
references, its genre conventions, its organization, the evidence it marshals in support of its
argument, and/or its disciplinary assumptions and values) and 3) articulate the ways the source
helps you understand your research topic in all of its complexity.
Requirements:
The bibliography should contain 3 or more sources, each with a correct citation, a paragraph
telling the reader the main argument and main points of the article, a description of the rhetorical
context (the journal and its audience, the purpose of the article, the conversation/debate it
references, its genre conventions, its organization, the evidence it marshals in support of its
argument, and/or its disciplinary assumptions and values), and a couple of sentences talking
about why you choose this article, about what it helps you understand about your research topic.
You will need to include copies of all your sources. See example below.
Downs, Doug and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions:
(Re)Envisioning ‘First Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” College
Composition and Communication 58.4 (2007): 552-585. Web. 10 Feb. 2011.
In this article, Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle propose a new model for first-year writing
classes. They argue that these classes should take writing studies as their content and that doing
so will benefit not only students but the discipline itself. They contend that the topic of the writing
class should be a study of writing; students should read and discuss and research issues involving
“writing, rhetoric, language and literacy” (553). They cite research that shows that students are
not transferring the lessons they learn in first-year writing classes to other writing situations (in other classes), and believe that it is because these first-year writing lessons don’t necessarily
apply to other situations (556-557); they contend that a better strategy would be to teach
“realistic and useful conception of writing - perhaps the most significant of which is that writing is
neither basic nor universal but content- and context-contingent and irreducibly complex” (557558), a strategy that requires students study and write about writing rather than about other
topics. They trace the success of their own pilot “writing about writing” courses, providing case
studies that show that the curriculum works for underprepared students as well as honors
students (564-573).
The article is aimed at writing teachers and perhaps faculty who make curriculum decisions for
first-year composition. The articles wants to convince this audience to adopt the proposed
curriculum and does this by drawing on research that calls into question the efficacy of the
curriculum of most first-year writing programs. It also addresses debates about the low status of
the discipline in the academy, arguing that the proposed curriculum will help remedy this low
status. The writers also directly address critics of the new curriculum, arguing against their
objections one by one. The article is arranged first to argue for the curriculum using alreadypublished and accepted research, then to describe in detail the proposed curriculum, then to
report on case studies of classes that taught the new curriculum, and then to argue against
critic’s objections. The article does not directly follow the social science model (literature review,
describe experiment, data from experiment, discuss conclusions based on data), but it does
loosely follow this model and is tightly structured with subheadings. The writers refer to
themselves by their last names or by “we,” especially in the case study portion of the article and
at the beginning of a section when they outline what they will do in that section. They also quote
heavily form their students’ own writing as proof that students did learn important lessons in the
new curriculum – showing that the article values first-hand experience of teachers (this is the
largest section in the article at nearly 9 pages in length). This article is incredibly useful in my
study of what skills students can take with them from their first-year writing classes. It provides a
discussion of why students can’t transfer many of the lessons they learn in learn in many firstyear writing to their other classes (academic discourse is not one thing) and it helps me
understand how rhetorical knowledge and an appreciation of the complexity of writing is
something they can take with them. The case study examples, in particular, are useful in helping
me see what students learned that will be helpful to them later.
Process:
Develop a narrowed research topic and focused research question
Find articles using library databases pertinent to your topic (Proquest and Academic Search
Complete)
Adapt research topic based on early findings
Read, evaluate, summarize, interpret, and describe sources
Draft citations for peer review
Present research to class
Revise for feedback from peers Submit two copies of the final draft of your annotated bibliography, a draft with feedback from
peers, and copies of all your sources ( hard copy to instructor ).
Attachments: